KARACHI: Pakistan leads the world in terms of financial losses suffered as a result of outages and shutdowns of internet and social media apps last year.
Pakistan topped the charts with a cumulative financial impact of $1.62 billion.
This was higher than the cost in countries like Sudan and Myanmar, which are ravaged by civil wars.
The report, released by Top10VPN.com, an independent VPN reviewer, said the global internet disruption lasted 88,788 hours, causing a total financial loss of $7.69bn.
Report claims online disruptions had $1.62bn financial impact in 2024
The data, published on Thursday, only estimated the cost of deliberate internet shutdowns — total blackouts, social media shutdowns and throttling — by the authorities, which happened 167 times across 28 countries.
“This kind of deliberate outage is internet censorship in its most extreme form. Not only do they infringe on citizens’ digital rights but they are also catastrophic acts of national economic self-sabotage, said Simon Migliano, the head of research at Top10VPN.com.
While the overall cost of internet shutdowns dropped by 15.8 per cent in 2024 compared to last year, their duration went up 12pc during the same time.
In 2023, 196 internet shutdowns in 25 countries for 79,238 hours cost $9.01bn.
Pakistan
For Pakistan, Top10VPN.com tracked 18 instances of deliberate internet shutdown for three major reasons — elections, “information control”, and protest — in 2024.
These disruptions lasted 9,735 hours and impacted 82.9 million users.
